Monday, March 10, 2014

Arduino–Day 2: Where the heck’s my Potentiometer?

The Arduino box has a picture of a Potentiometer on the box. It’s a wire diagram. No color. It has a tapered off top. The part description inside has this in color. Suffice to say I banged my head on the wall trying to figure out which component it was till I gave up and tried setting up my LCD without a potentiometer. Should be simple, yes?

Nope… The whole day I couldn’t get the blasted thing to work from the Arduino tutorial. I figured, Potentiometer is but a switch. One ground, one power & a control wire. How difficult could it be?

Well, that’s the topic for my next post.

Let’s now answer the million dollar question. Who do we turn to when we have a question answered? Yeah, I googled this one. Didn’t work out so well.

No help this one either. Did ask googleoutright though. Links that came back didn’t seem to be too helpful. Patience is a virtue. We do not scroll now. Do we?

Finally, I realized the white knob like appendages might go on top of the blue three legged thingies in the box. Viola! I had a turnable analog knob! So, that’s what Potentiometer does. It’s just like the variable speed regulator of a frigging ceiling fan! We still use those in India.

In retrospection, Google did help. The first link actually has a datasheet that has a picture. The google image search returned a picture of an Arduino Potentiometer on the 7th row.

For the likes of me (dummies? ), the manual should have warned “partial assembly required” for the potentiometer in the component listing. (no winks… I’m dead serious). And did I tell you the part in the box actually does NOT have a tapered off top?